106
cinema, a people ripe for catas–
trophe.
West was cut off just at the mo–
ment when he seemed to be aevel–
oping into a novelist of more than
ordinary proportions, and it is of
course fruitless to speculate about.
what he might have become had•
he lived.
Miss Lonelyhearts
will.
possibly remain a "minor classic,"
and West may come to rate a foot- ."
note in the histories of the
academ-~
icians. But he
will
always appeal .
to readers with a taste for the bi–
zarre, who can respond to his deli–
rious vision and find some meaning
in his fantastic realism.
DANIEL AARON
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Thanks are due to the Oxford
University Press for permission to
publish, in the November-Decem–
ber
1946
issue, William Troy's
translation of the Baudelaire re–
virw of
Madame Bovary.
The art–
icle will be included in a selection
of Baudelaire's prose writings, ed–
ited and translated by Mr. Troy,
which Oxford will publish in the
near future.
"modern civilization...
"
These are the opening words of
a booklet that explains why we
offer free courses
in
economics
and the social sciences both in
classroom and by correspondence.
Just send us a postcard and we'll
send the booklet. Ask for book–
let R.
henry george school of social science
50 east 69th street, new york 21, n. y.
telephone: RHinelander 4-8700
PARTISAN REVIEW
A Note
on a Genteel Reader
I
F
MARK ScHORER's review of
The Partisan Reader
and his re–
marks about PARTISAN REVIEW (in
The New Republic
of November
11, 1946)
were merely an expres–
sion of Mr. Scherer's personal feel–
ings, we would not think that what
he said required our attention. But
the fact is that his attitude i.s typi–
cal of a certain kind of reader.
Scherer is but one of many; the
type is middlebrow, academic, gen–
teel, interested in modern litera–
ture up to a certain point. The
point is reached when modern lit–
erature becomes too difficult, too
serious or extreme, too much in–
volved in a desperate commitment
to the conclusions which its experi–
ence has made inevitable.
At this point Mr. Harry Levin,
an erudite academician who has re–
cently announced that literature is
an institution, finds it necessary to
recoil from the criticism of modem
life in Joyce's
Ulysses
and to declare
Joyce a merely verbal master who
in using four-letter words was be–
ing nothing more than literary. In
a like way, Scherer praises certain
stories in
The Partisan R eader
be–
cause they are "apolitical, even
asocial," although every story he
praises is social in a way which has
political implications, as, for ex–
ample, the story "America! Amer–
ica!" in which the theme is the
failure of a whole group of immi–
grants to realize the American
dream of success, a failure caused
by the depression, a catastrophe
